The Arkansaw traveler., 1887-07-16
BY COLONEL P. DOMAIN.

BY COLONEL P. DOMAIN.
 A lady, whose fame as a brilliant and accomplished leader in our new world society is something more than national, asked me in Washington, short time since, what regarded as the finest region of the globe. I re- piled: "Madam, that depends much upon the exact meaning you attach to the word finest. Do you mean the finest or most attractive region ill beauty and sublimity of natural scenery, in fertility or productive ca- pacity, or in capabilities for the making of pleasant homes and rearing the best race of men and women?" She said: '.Include all these ideas, take all these points into considerations"
 1t was not question to be hastily answered, even by one whose life has been spent in rambling, with observant eyes and ears, over this most beautiful and lovely of all the worlds that Om- impotence originally sent whirling, in mingled splendor and harmony, through the star-and- planet gemmed intinitudes' of space. My reply was given with much hesitation and diff dence, but I think it was correct, and am inclined to believe it may not be wholly uninteresting to others besides my charming friend. l said in sub- stance:
 Jump with me into the balloon of hundred years to come. l keep one always blown up to give my friends little jaunts to realms they will prob ably never visit by any other convey ance. It is inflated with gas that sends it rushing like a rocket to an altitude of five hundred miles. It carries it's own atmosphere and other rations, and is supplied with glasses so powerful as to enable the voyager at that dizzy height-one four hundred -eightieth part of the distance to the moon-to distin- guish every blade of grass and tint of flower, every quivering twig and leaf and spray, every tleck of foam on sea and lake and stream, and every shim- mering of light and shadow on moun- tain and valley, forest and plain, on the face of the fair world so far below. A thousand miles of terrestrial surface lies spread out, like vast bird's-eye map or picture, at every glance.
 We sweep over Europe, with its kingly and queenly puppets, and its hordes of ignorant peasantry only one remove above the donkeys they drive. its palaces and novels nestling side by side; its imperial splendors and its ab- ject squalor interminglcd; its art gal leries with their priceless hoards of treasures divine; its cathedrals and abbeys, fortresses and castles; its tiny fields hardly big enough for Dakota farmers pig-pen; it's swarms of mo- bles and bandits, priests, princes and beggars; it's vast standing armies of tinsel- -bedizened mercenaries, ever ready to hack each other into buzzards' bait at the word or the nod of a crowned and sceptered savage: and it's troops of gilded American vuIgarians, splurging in uncouth gorgeousness all over foreign lands, while they know nothing of their own. There are grand scenes in the Alps and the Apennines, lovely homes in England, rich fields in Germany, sunny slopes in vine-clad France and Italy and Spain, majestic forests in Norway, Sweden and Russia, teeming hives of industry, and infinite wealth of his toric and poetic association every- where; but the modern Eden is not here.
 We drift on over the wide and desert steppes of Asia; the frozen wastes of Siberia; the tea-gardens and rice swamps of China, swarming with nearly one-f fifth of the whole popula- tion of the world, in wooden-soled shoes and pigtails; the spice- groves ot Ceylon and Java, and the busy and progressive island-empire of the Mi kado. We pause over India, land of romance and wretchedness, of riches and abject poverty; with its cloud piercing mountains, its mines of jewels and gold, its soil rich in their yield oi all valuable products, and its wild jungles reeking with pestilence and swarming with savage beasts and deadly reptiles; where fabulous for tunes have been amassed or stolen fo, ages, and where 25,000 people die oi snake-bite every year. We hover above the rocks and sterile sands oi the Holy Land, whose every rugged mountain-top and valley and grove o1 gnarled and knotted olives, is hallowed by humanity's most sacred memories We finger above the ruins of Babylon the Great, where the wandering Arat stalls his steed in the palaces of kings and the temples of gods long over. thrown and forgotten. Here, on the